This year’s Women’s FA Cup Final will be played on an historic date. When Arsenal take on Chelsea at Wembley on Sunday, it will be exactly 100 years since the English Football Association banned women from playing at any league ground.
Watching the cup final every bit as keenly as the fans will be Kelly Simmons, director of the women’s professional game at the FA. When she joined the governing body in 1991, there were only eight teams in the newly formed National League, very few girls’ teams, and the FA wasn’t responsible for the women’s game for another two years.
“There was very little structure for women’s football,” says Simmons. “Traditionally, girls were driven towards what were perceived to be more female sports, like hockey and netball.”
This attitude dated back to 1921, when the FA passed a resolution declaring that “football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”.
Its playing ban was imposed months after a Boxing Day match at Everton’s Goodison Park in Liverpool in 1920 was watched by 50,000 people – more than the 45,000 sold so far for Sunday’s cup final.
Despite the ban eventually being lifted in 1971 after 50 years, women’s football long remained under the radar, as Simmons can attest – she wasn’t allowed to play football at school and only got into the sport at university.
Happily, things are changing. In March, the FA announced a major broadcast deal with the BBC and Sky for the Women’s Super League (WSL), the biggest commercial agreement of its kind, at £8m a year. It has already pulled in eight million new viewers this season.
It was Simmons who oversaw the WSL going fully professional in 2018 – the first women’s league in Europe to do so – and the following year Barclays signed a three-year deal, thought to be worth close to £20m, to become title sponsors.
“That was a major breakthrough, having a brand of that credibility get behind and invest in the WSL,” says Simmons.
She wants to see the same kind of changes at a grassroots level. “I want to make sure this generation has so many more opportunities,” she says.
“Now they can be professional footballers and girls are playing in schools right across the country. The change, thanks to so many people, has been transformational.”
It is also an exciting time for the international team. On Tuesday, England’s Lionesses beat Latvia 20-0 – their biggest competitive win to date. Ellen White became their highest-ever goalscorer.
But there is still much work to be done to make football accessible to all. Throughout the game, sexism remains rampant. Last month, a report by the Football Supporters’ Association found that one in five women had been subjected to unwanted physical attention at men’s games, while one in three had heard sexist comments.
It was this kind of behaviour that led 12 female football fans to set up the campaign Her Game Too in May, to combat sexism in the sport, including online and at men’s games. It has now partnered with 25 clubs, including Bristol Rovers, Exeter City and Port Vale, to set up reporting systems where fans can report sexist abuse at matches, alongside a reporting system on its own website.
“I know, you’re never going to change everybody’s minds, we are aware of that,” says co-founder Lucy Ford, a Bristol Rovers fan. “But I’m hoping to see a shift.
“It might not be in my generation. For me, it’s about the next generation of those young girls that are starting to watch football, starting to play, and they want to go and watch their team home and away when they’re older. It’s making sure that it’s a safe space for them.”
Ford has been subjected to unwanted physical contact while in bar queues at away games. “Some guy comes behind you and touches you on your back. It’s like: why are you doing that?” she says. “It makes you feel uncomfortable.”
Ford has also heard sexist comments directed at Bristol Rovers’ physiotherapist, who is a woman, when she was tending to the team’s goalkeeper.
“Someone said, ‘Oh, I hope I go down so she can rub my balls’, or something like that. I just turned around and I said, ‘Do you really think what you’re saying is appropriate?’ She was in earshot as well.”
Financially, the women’s game is still eclipsed by men’s football. While annual salaries in the WSL start at around £20,000 and can reach up to £200,000 for leading players, the average salary for a male Premier League player exceeds £3m.
In September, Uefa announced that it would double the prize money for its Women’s Euro 2022 tournament – hosted by England – to €16m. But that is just a fraction of the €371m shared last year at the men’s championship.
Simmons is keen to “try not to get drawn to comparing it with the men’s game, because that is a multi-billion pound industry that’s been there for the long term”. The women’s game, she says, has “got a different history, it’s at a different stage in its evolution”.
“There’s some really special things about the women’s game, and about the sort of the closeness of the players and the fans, and the culture of respect,” she says.
She acknowledges that Covid-19 has posed “challenges of getting people back out” to WSL matches, which had reached record attendance levels in 2019 following the success of the Women’s World Cup that summer. But she is hoping to “capitalise on the interest and the profile” of Euro 2022. “The tournament is going to be huge,” she says, “a landmark moment for women’s football in this country.”
But for now, there is Sunday’s final to look forward to. “We’ve got world-class players, great teams and great excitement,” she says.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3pnRxID
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